Kawai Piano Lessons: Turn Simple Chords Into Pro-Level Runs

Want to add instant tension and drama to your piano playing? In this quick lesson, pianist Michael teaches you how to transform any major chord into a diminished chord with just two simple half-step movements—and how to resolve it for a professional, expressive sound.

Watch the full lesson above, or follow along with the complete transcript below.

Video Transcript

Hi there. I’m Michael. In this lesson, we’re going to be trying to add a little bit of flair to arpeggios. Arpeggios are pretty fundamental to learning piano, but on their own they can sound pretty bare.

Just by adding a little bit of tension and a little bit of color to an otherwise basic arpeggio, you can transform it into something that has a lot more motion, a lot more emotion in any song you’re playing.

Here’s what I mean. We’re going to be focusing on arpeggios today, so I’m going to assume that you have a pretty solid technique for playing them. Here’s just a basic one on B major.

With clean technique, that already sounds fine, but if you want to use it, say in a song or on a show, I would first start by thinking about how to make it sound a little bit less dry. One of the first things that I would turn to is maybe using pedal and keeping your left hand just on the root note.

Just already there, you’ve got something that is, I would say, a lot deeper of a sound. Try this on a couple other keys, maybe.

So the first thing that we’re going to do to introduce a little bit more color to our arpeggio is introduce the left hand. Now instead of staying down here and just holding the root note, the left hand is going to travel up the keyboard along with the right hand.

To first start things off, I’ll just have it play the fifth every octave, while the right hand just does the regular arpeggio, but with four notes. Now here’s what that sounds like with the pedal.

And you’ll hear that I’m accenting my left hand as well to give it a little bit of rhythmic drive. Try that on a couple of different chords. D-flat.

Now the next step, if you want to add a little bit more color, is introduce maybe a few notes that are not in the chord. The notes that I find tend to work best with this are chromatic notes a little bit away from the chord.

If we look at B again, maybe something like C adds a ton of tension to this chord. Listen to what that sounds like with the arpeggio now.

And alone without the pedal.

And again, let’s try that in C and D-flat as well.

Alrighty, you’ve got a much more colorful chord. If you wanted to really push this to its limit, I would start introducing things like maybe an F to the B chord, maybe D, or you could introduce multiple notes at the same time. Here’s B-flat and C.

No matter what, the core concept remains the same. You’re taking what was a basic arpeggio, alternating your hands as you travel up the keyboard, and then finally introducing a couple more notes to add a little bit more color and rhythm to the arpeggio.

To get this to the point where it feels natural and is just a part of your vocabulary, you’re going to want to take it through all 12 keys chromatically, and probably work it with a metronome as well.